News & Events
COMMENTS ON THE DEDICATION OF THE RODNEY PERKINS MICROSURGERY LABORATORY:
This evening we will hear about the many accomplishments Rodney Perkins who is one of Silicon Valley's most prolific entrepreneurs. We are fortunate to have on our program tonight a highly professional video that beautifully chronicles the details of his entrepreneurial career. This affords me the opportunity to focus instead upon some highly personal reflections about the contributions Rod has made to education and innovation at Stanford and why I see him in many ways as the embodiment of the best of the Stanford ideal. As a measure of how seriously I took this opportunity, this is probably the one and only time you will ever hear me speak without slides.
Rod is a Hoosier who made his way to the wild west and then thoroughly adopted the adventuresome spirit of his new land. I suspect closer to the truth is that he was born a Californian at heart and gravitated here because it was his natural homeland. While it is true that Stanford and the surrounding area has been a fertile ground for growing entrepreneurs, this is in part because those so minded, such as Rod Perkins, are attracted here.
Although Rod benefited greatly from his Stanford training, as a true inventor did not take his education too seriously. Typical of an individual with an uncommon dose of creativity, Rod has never been one to be hidebound by orthodox thinking. He is an original and iconoclastic thinker. This has been the essential element in his success.
After Stanford residency, Rod took his otologic fellowship at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. The House Group is a highly successful and innovative private practice group with an affiliated research institute. Rod and I share a special kinship of both having taken this same fellowship. This experience helped to shape both of our careers down our respective paths.
At an early stage in his career, Rod chose to emulate the House model when he created the California Ear institute and a research enterprise called Project Hear. His CEI had a close relationship with Stanford. As a clinical professor in our department he was for many years the primary educator of Stanford otolaryngology residents in ear surgery and ran the temporal bone microsurgery course. He also started a research fellowship for medical students and undergraduates who worked to apply technological solutions to practical problems in surgery.
I first met Rod when I was a young resident at UCSF in about 1980. I attended a series of seminars on advanced ear microsurgery he gave in San Francisco at a private downtown club. He gave beautifully illustrated talks about the how and why of doing ear microsurgery. This experience was one of my inspirations to enter the field of otology. Rather than just teaching us to do ear surgery, Rod’s talks always were laced with references to new inventions he envisioned. He challenged us to think with originality and to seek novel solutions.
For 20 years, Rod has taught in biannual San Francisco Otology Update - even over the 15 years when the brochures were blue & gold rather than their present cardinal red. I was always honored that he took time out of his hectic schedule to participate. He had many more important things to do, but he never forgot his roots in clinical otology. Rod could always be counted on to give a superb presentation accompanied with the finest illustrations.
His talks were often tinged with a healthy dose of controversy –he really knows how to spice up a program. Panels with Rod on them were never dull. I suspect he knows that I purposely invited him to serve on panels with those of differing opinions with the hope it would spark fireworks. He never disappointed me and I loved absolutely every minute of it!
Once while discussing his philosophy of clinical medicine, Rod told me that while he loved doing ear surgery, he had come to realize that caring for one patient at a time was like doing piece work. I completely agreed with his central premise: Why limit your efforts to one at a time when you have the potential to help thousands or even millions?
As they say: "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and . . . well you know the story. I could not help also remember how Dick Goode once reinterpreted this proverb, “"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.” So much for respecting the sanctity of timeless parables.
Numerous times during my early career Rod encouraged me to consider leaving the academic womb to pursue an entrepreneurial model as a way of enhancing my life’s impact. I was indeed tempted, Rod seemed like a wise Yoda encouraging me to become a Jedi Knight. My UCSF faculty colleague Bob Schindler saw it differently, likening the proposition more to Darth Vader luring me to the dark side of the force. While it's true that I ended with hospital cafeterias rather than breakfasts at Buck's in Woodside, since coming to Stanford I feel I have, in some measure, been able to satisfy this urge to translate discoveries.
I am immensely grateful with how supportive Rod was when I was considering whether or not to come to Stanford. He was both reassuring and encouraging. Once we decided to make the move, he very generously offered to put up Laurie and our family in a house on their property while we arranged a permanent home. This was way beyond the call of duty and much appreciated.
Though Rod is an ear microsurgeon, it is remarkable that his inventions have spanned a wide variety of medical disciplines. For example, take Collagen Corp. This started out with the notion of creating synthetic eardrums and ended up morphing into a company which marketed a highly successful tissue filler. Pursuing an idea, even out of one’s comfortable and familiar realm, is a symbol of both his adaptability and fortitude. I am unaware of any other otologists have transcended the auditory system to crate successful companies in far flung fields such as gynecology and pulmonary medicine. I welcome his return, in recent years, to his roots in the ear with ventures such as Sound ID and the Ear Lens project.
The term "entrepreneur" is borrowed from French. In French the word "entre" meaning "between" and the verb "prendre" meaning "to take". To take – between. I would interpret this to mean taking an idea and linking it with the action needed to bring it to fruition. Entrepreneurs are often successful not because they were unique in having a great ideas but because they were unique in taking action on great ideas.
In the 1880’s everyone knew the country needed a transcontinental railroad, it was an obvious idea. It took someone with the talents and perseverance of Leland Stanford to actually build it. Now – I don't want to be accused of having labeled Rod Perkins a robber baron, quite the contrary, my point is that he exemplifies the best Stanford tradition first established by Leland himself. Some people dream of great accomplishments, while others stay awake and actually do them. Some of Rod’s inventions have flowed from his vision of the future is perceiving opportunities not yet recognized by others. As Henry Ford once said about the process of invention: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse."
Rod's point of view is that the best way to predict the future is to invent it yourself.
Entrepreneurship is often a difficult undertaking, as a majority of new businesses fail. According to Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Failure defeats losers and inspires winners. As Winston Churchill put it: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." My sense of Rod is that he combines a keen sense of realism with an indefatigable optimism and a dogged sense of determination.
To succeed, Rod has had to take risks. Faced with such choices, most of us would feel like a long tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Despite his willingness to assume a degree of risk, I do not see Rod as a wanton risk taker. Rather he is more a passionate expert than a gambler. He works through calculation, planning, and skilled execution to leave as little as possible to chance. While there is an element of truth to Henry Kravis’ contention that “a real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them”, serial successes such as Rod has enjoyed provides somewhat of a cushion in each subsequent endeavor. To a degree Rod is like a winning sports franchise, success tends to beget success.
Nevertheless, each new venture carries unique risk, some which can be anticipated and others which arise unpredictability. I am intrigued by the way Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries put it: “an entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.” Following this analogy, Rod is as adept a masticator as they come.
Egg headed academics and hard headed entrepreneurs share many traits, but also differ in important ways. We both have the urge to create new knowledge and possess an abiding passion for our work. Whereas entrepreneurs live to pitch to venture capitalists; we academicians have to sell our ideas to a Deans, donors, and grants review boards. Sometimes I am not sure who has the tougher audience!
Entrepreneurs by their very nature do not easily tolerate organized, highly structured, hierarchical environments such as universities. Come to think of it, neither do academics; but as inmates in a big institution, it is our chosen lot. The essence of my career as a departmental chair has been to work with such systems to best advantage: circumventing their limitations while building consensus around major decisions. By contrast, Rod has enjoyed the luxury of avoiding university bureaucracy altogether and independently deciding important issues without interminable consultations. I believe this is what he means when he says he enjoys the best of both worlds.
Fortunately, Stanford is, in all probability, the world’s most friendly university when it comes to innovation and commercialization. Our motto: The wind of Freedom Blows (Die Luft der Freiheit weht) – sets the tone for a free flow of ideas. This interchange is inherently bidirectional; ideas and knowledge ought to flow both in to and out from the institution with equal facility. The porous walls of Stanford constitute one of its finest attributes – one which distinguishes it from many less innovative institutions. We also benefit from a tradition which holds that it is more beneficial to collaborate rather than compete. This is a point of clear distinction between the business and academic worlds.
Scholars and entrepreneurs share one universal trait: a healthy skepticism for authority in all of its forms. In my view the defining characteristic of the Stanford culture is that it is a place in which the authority of the highest idea prevails over the idea of the highest authority.
According to the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan: “To make an apple pie from scratch, we must first invent the universe.” In this abstraction lies the essence of the partnership between Stanford, Rod Perkins, and others who seek to bring emerging technology to market. Stanford’s forte is basic research, which is often has little or no immediately obvious commercial potential. Recall that it was Stanford Professor’s William Shockley’s invention of the transistor that lead directly into the conversion of square miles of orchards into today’s Silicon Valley and simultaneously transformed Stanford’s farm from a bucolic liberal arts institution into the incubator of new science and technology that it is today.
Although Stanford is renowned for the entrepreneurship of its faculty and graduates I agree with Rod that we should do more to nurture those with the potential to become successful entrepreneurs. That is why I applaud the surgical entrepreneur program Rod has sponsored along with Tom Krummel and the interdisciplinary Biodesign program which is a joint venture by the schools of engineering and medicine. Our department eagerly seeks full participation in these important programs.
Rod shared with me that he felt Stanford played a "big role" in his success. He cited both innovative spirit of Stanford, he talked about the Stanford milieu, and the collaborations of a number of specific individuals such as Dick Goode (a year ahead of him in residency), Blair Simmons (a former chief of Stanford OHNS), and Bob White (a former Chair of electrical engineering).
There has been a long tradition of successful entrepreneurs giving back to mother Stanford to further our shared cause. I see Rod and Sherry’s generous gift of their Microsurgery Laboratory as exemplary of this fine tradition. My fervent hope is that in using this splendid facility our Stanford trainees will be inspired to follow in Rod's footsteps along the pathway of innovation.
